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A guide for shifting thoughts on problem-solving and approaching design, innovation, and change through a complexity lens – By Design & Critical Thinking.
An introduction to sensemaking and complexity management for designers, managers, and decision-makers.
We tend to see design and innovation as problem-solving spaces. This engineering and sometimes mechanistic approach is not bad in itself but brings a lot of limitations, one major being to quickly frame whatever challenge into a narrow, finite, solution.
When facing uncertainty, designers, innovators, and changemakers might feel unempowered. We look for recipes and pre-packaged generalist solutions — “the answer”, that sells an illusion of certainty through the economy of speed — to help us disambiguate our very specific contexts.
Problem-solvers look for answers. Explorers look for better questions.
Instead, exploration makes the invisible visible. This multi-layered understanding will add more potential to our portfolio of possibilities.
Problem-solvers reduce options. Explorers enable possibilities.
New challenges are invitations to become curious explorers, in a world where everything is believed to be known, predictable, and ordinary.
The explorer’s framework is a set of ideas & concepts for practitioners to help approach challenges and problems in ways that add layers (rather than subtract), enable possibilities (rather than reduce), diversify points of views, and enable a portfolio of strategies & actions to tackle (complex) challenges (rather than single-point solutions).
Exploration is not to be opposed to conception — it is a useful tension. Exploration should be pursued as a parallel ongoing journey with no clear end. It is the philosophy & ethics of the curious humble learner.
Written and put together by Kevin Richard.
Special thanks to Marc Baumgartner, Cameron Norman, Enrique Martínez, Daiana Zavate, Lucien Langton, Corina Lupu, Alexis Gerome, and the Design & Critical Thinking Community for their help in improving this project and sharing thoughts, ideas, and improvements.
The explorer’s metaphor is a series of articles that aim to provide an introduction to sensemaking and complexity management for designers, managers, and decision-makers.
You are navigating on (more or less) calm seas and see on the horizon an island. You don’t know how big the island is, or what to find there. If you were to land on its shore, you wouldn’t know where you are because you don’t have any point of reference yet. You know, however, that a map would be useful for you to make better decisions, as to what seems important to understand and explore first.
An island is a context, a subject, something you can’t ignore, solve, or remove. There are people, an ecosystem, infrastructures, a topography, a local weather system, things that are unique, and others that are generic. Beyond these, there are, not visible at first glance, relationships between them that determine values and meanings in this specific context.
This is your challenge, the context of the problem you are facing. This is its physical (and virtual), yet often imperceptible, space.
As for problems, from where you are, looking at the island, you can get a rough idea of some of its features, but you’re too far to understand all the relationships at play there: you’re still in a . Concluding too quickly to anything by deduction or extrapolation, so far, would be a mistake (and in your case, a potentially life or death one).
Repurposing our triangulation network.
Several contexts, challenges, or problems can be found close to each other, like an archipelago.
An archipelago is a coherent group of islands — or a coherent group of contexts. Each island/context can be very different in size and ecosystem but are related to each other in a fundamental way.
The explorer’s metaphor is a series of articles that aim to provide an introduction to sensemaking and complexity management for designers, managers, and decision-makers.
Explorers should not be seen as lonely individuals. As part of a larger system, they are components of the network that represent their organisation, and distribution is a necessary feature of the network.
Not everyone in an organization has knowledge of or is aware of the same things, at the same time, in the same way. This is not (necessarily) a matter of hierarchy: consider instead how formal and informal networks work and influence the flow of information.
Like an island might possess beaches, forests, rivers, mountains, abrupt cliffs, (etc.) organisations’ complexity, activities, and processes are both informed by the larger context of the organisation itself as well as the local specificities that people are facing.
Seeing information as energy allows one to treats it with similar properties. Energy cannot be created nor deleted, only transformed. More so, energy can move through mediums (energy vectors), which are not all equal in terms of effectiveness & efficiency.
Formal and informal ways to gather and/or treat information constrain information in different ways, offering different losses & gains on the net output, affecting scope and scale of understanding.
For instance, an undirected, unbonded conversation is an informal way to gather information communicating a lot of depth & details, allowing context-blending (people can relate to similar personal experiences) and providing flexible enabling constraints through stories. The downside might be added noise in the information processing.
On the other side of the spectrum, directed, motivated, goal-oriented methods like, say, a survey or some forms of interviews formalise information through predetermined/anticipated inputs, filtering information and providing more rigid constraints.
There is a relationship between how we are making sense of our context and what we can do about this understanding.
As human beings, we rely on our senses to understand the world (at a personal level). Our senses are distributed over all the body. They help us triangulate very well distances, speed, sizes, danger, (etc.) of objects and events through a variety of input types: sight, hearing, touch, etc. They enable us to make sense, perceive, anticipate, act, and influence our environment.
relates to the concept that body and mind are inseparable and that they are both necessary features of our cognitive abilities. In other words, we cannot “think” how we think and “experience the world” how we experience it — aka be human — without the brain AND the body (and its senses) we have. Cognition is, therefore, distributed, not located .
“This is not [the] claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment…” — George Lakoff and Rafeal Núñez
Our senses are a network of sensors through which we perceive the world.
Similarly, explorers can build a sensory network at a challenge and/or organizational level, by connecting parts & people to help give shape to the & . Doing so help triangulate information and give depth in terms of meaning & understanding, creating a new “meta-sense of self” for the organisation.
Building such a network can be done through various means and mediums, but it is worth mentioning they will not all allow for the same type of interactions impacting the type of information that can be gathered, the effectiveness of the overall network response, and our perception of the information.
Synchronicity allows for immediate, direct, prompted feedback which tends to be also very localised and context-specific. It is extremely useful contextually but also energy-intensive and, therefore, generally hard to sustain for a long period of time.
Asynchronicity allows for delayed, indirect, unprompted feedback. More energy-effective but also less context-specific, it can be run over long periods of time. This tends to allow to build a much broader sense of the patterns at play.
Availability (perceived instantaneity) will define the effort (friction) that the network will have to take in order to generate feedback. The more asynchronous, the greater we want perceived instantaneity because of delayed response from the feedback mechanism.
All are needed at some point. Time and speed variations are important elements and patterns of synchronicity, asynchronicity, and availability are interesting ways to capture, process, and triangulate information from the network, by the network.
The explorer’s metaphor is a series of articles that aim to provide an introduction to sensemaking and complexity management for designers, managers, and decision-makers.
is the study of the forms and features of land surfaces. The topography of an area could refer to the surface forms and features themselves, or a description (especially their depiction in maps).
Sensemaking is about creating a coherent approximation of the terrain. It is the act of creating an .
Coherency is what we look for. Uncertain and complex contexts might display contradictory narratives and hypotheses, and the worse thing here would be to be unable to act or wait too long before it’s too late.
For coherent patterns to emerge, we need to understand the space of the context. Mapping the territory helps makes sense of it, understand interactions, relationships, influences, etc. A useful map in an unclear situation is not necessarily one that displays all possible details of reality, but one that gives enough relevant information to find our marks, give direction, and make decisions.
The map is composed of a collection of different information, descriptions, characteristics, etc. that help describe (and share the understanding of) what we see on the terrain from different perspectives. As an actual terrain posses different elevations, mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, etc. These are structural elements, such as people, activities, processes, products, etc. Those are dispositional constraints.
Even more so, the terrain is what it is. Changing it by direct means is costly, effortful, and probably the last thing we would like to try when things are unpredictable. Think about managing floodplains or digging tunnels for instance.
Instead, what we see in nature is organisms adapt to the terrain. Information will always take the most cost-effective pathways. Locally, paths are sustained only if value is delivered to the network, otherwise, they simply atrophy.
The question, therefore, is: how might we change the relationships between different elements, the components, that compose our terrain?
Sometimes it requires making the invisible visible and enable discussions & collaboration to emerge around this understanding. Sometimes it requires a more direct medium, such as a product or change in processes. And sometimes it requires a parallelization of different strategies to increase the chances of positive impacts.
The explorer’s metaphor is a series of articles that aim to provide an introduction to sensemaking and complexity management for designers, managers, and decision-makers.
An unknown sea is a place of unknown unknowns. The links between phenomenons in the landscape are not obvious, and this ambiguity can hardly be resolved as these flows are constantly changing.
This is a place where stories –even conflicting ones– strives because they allow coherence in our experiences: a place of monsters, wonders, and mysteries.
Unknown seas are a special type of complexity, one that remains full of uncertainty even when explored because they keep changing, evolving, and adapting. They allow contradictions to exist at the same time. There is no normal, no default. Uncertainty is the rule.
Navigating such flows requires us to reframe our approach:
There is no predefined “route” – the path and its constraints unfold as we move.
There is no destination – the map has no static points to target.
Risk is inherent – every action (even doing nothing) is a decision with unforeseeable consequences.
Instead of a destination, what explorers might better look at is gaining a sense of direction.
If destination is a known fixed point in time/space, direction is the act of riding flows we have no control over with intent.
Navigating complexity requires both knowledge & practice (), reflection & action, slow & fast, etc. It requires also careful awareness of any predefined paradigms that might hinder our ability to know & act: exploration is an act of “letting go” (to paraphrase D. Snowden).
Direction does not precedes but rather emerges from praxis.
relates to the distortion or misrepresentation of one’s meanings and occurs, for instance, when a group applies predefined filters and categorisation to field data. Interpretation is subtracted from individuals and externalised for the sake of an illusion of objectivity.
Predefined paradigms impact interpretation to fit internal coherence: we find what we are looking for, even though we might encounter information that contradicts our views.
Explorers might rather let meaning emerge from data, and be open to being surprised — exploration should be fueled by curiosity:
Self-categorisation by participants during data collection allows for the emergence of large patterns.
Qualitative participatory collection suits the informal gathering of data and allows for the emergence of localised patterns.
Furthermore, finding direction is a combination of making sense and acting in the present. Navigating unknown seas is the art of looking around for clues of wind or current changes, steering left, adjusting speed, and assessing the situation again.
Dave Snowden describes “” song from Frozen II movie, .
Change, which ultimately underlies any form of design and innovation, is something that resembles not a recipe –rather its antithesis. It requires navigating the unknown seas we . Indeed, in unknown contexts, change is unpredictable, but that does not mean you should navigate blindly.
Change is about potentials, energy allocation, and adjacent possibles, that increases the likelihood of certain outcomes. Unintended consequences are the default. As explorers, we want to grow the type of changes we want to see and this requires creating and maintaining the necessary structure that would support its growth, a scaffolding structure.
A scaffolding is a structure that is not meant to last, and serves as a support to grow, build, or repair [something], usually the end-structure meant to last. The obvious example that comes to mind is in architecture & construction, but such structures can also be found in nature, as part of plants ecosystem for instance, and are used in medical application research. In other words, a scaffolding is an enabler. Furthermore, we should be able to remove the scaffold (or let it decay) and whatever we helped grow should sustain itself.
However, not all processes are equal in terms of their ability to sustain a scaffolding approach.
Many innovation and design processes exist as means to reduce options to a few that are the most suited to a certain problem. This engineering approach to innovation & design as “problem-solving” assumes that for a defined problem there is a set number of solutions, amongst which there is the best solution. Indeed, this works in rather clear, unambiguous, and static situations but not in a complex, ambiguous, and ever-evolving context.
The problem is not always “defined” nor is it “a problem”, rather it is an entanglement of patterns, processes, systems, (etc.) from which what is identified as “problematic” emerges. Here “root cause analysis” does not work because nothing is specifically the cause but the entangled interactions and any changes to one of these intertwined patterns will necessarily have unpredictable consequences. This ambiguity is what defines a complex context.
Funnelling processes seek to remove options to a specific set or subset suitable to address a specific problem or specific asperities of the problem. Funnelling processes look for causal relationships between the solution and predefined outcomes. This works well when ambiguity/uncertainty is low/marginal because consequences are known, knowable, isolated and localised. Most iterations of the Design Thinking process, the Design Sprint, Hackatons, etc. displays funnelling patterns.
Layering processes seek to increase options for an unspecified, unclear situation and/or challenge. Layering processes look for potentials, probabilities, and likelihoods, to “increase the things we want to see” and “decrease the things we don’t” –knowing that unintended consequences are the default in uncertain situations. Such a process is what is needed to sustain a scaffolding approach. It is done through a portfolio of strategies or a portfolio of innovation.
Processes bring a form of “coherence” through constraints. For these constraints to work, they need to be in relation to their ecological environment (the organisation, the team, the culture). This means that processes exist in relation to –and therefore respond to– their environment. The relationship is not symmetric though, and processes in environments that display high levels of certainty can claim more control over its conditions (to some extent).
However, this interdependence is key to understanding the notion of bounded applicability: that certain things work in certain contexts but not in others. In other words, you cannot simply take a process as it is done in one company, for instance, paste it in another one and expect it to work as if it was akin to replacing a mechanical part for another.
You don’t “implement” the Spotify, Agile, IBM, whatever model, nor do you “apply” the Design Thinking, Lean, whateverprocess. You try to let something emerge that resembles it because it displays similar patterns –assuming you understand them– but it will be unique to the context you’re evolving in. This requires transposability, assimilation, to fit the landscape of your organisation. This work changes the organisation in return: again, it is a co-evolution process. The useful bit here is to focus on the key patterns that increase the chances to generate the things we want to see and reduce the things we do not.
If we agree that layering processes are what helps create a scaffolding approach, what does this help us achieve? Well, it helps create a portfolio of strategies. The idea is to generate several small and local strategies in parallel, something that a layering process is best suited for, in order to change a fuzzy, complex challenge, not with a direct solution, but with a combination of actions that might take effect at different points in space and time. This means working on strategies inside and outside the organisation, and which have the potential to generate outcomes in a shorter and longer timeframe.
Fuzzy, unclear challenges are sometimes called “wicked problems”, but I think this a mistake because it gives the illusion they can be “solved” like other “problems”, just with different means. The idea of scaffolding and having a portfolio of strategies is not about a single-point solution to “solve” something simply “difficult to understand”, it is the acknowledgement through praxis that the entangled nature of such challenges makes them dispositionally problematic – that is to say, irreducible from the structures they emerge from.
